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By Root 1460 0

ever got up there) and urinated down upon the preacher’s head. The preacher retreated, yelling, “I’ll git ye, yet!” and he went away and preached to the people for several more days and nights, without succeeding in persuading any of them to help him chop down the tree. He went again with his axe late at night, when he was sure Noah would be asleep, but at the first THOCK of the axe Noah woke up, and squatted backwards at the edge of his birdtrot. Enraged, the preacher hurled his axe at Noah. The axe missed Noah, but imbedded itself in the side of the treehouse, where Noah allowed it to remain as an ornament, and where it may be minutely detected in our illustration. His brother Jacob, visiting the next day, noticed it and asked Noah about it and then declared, “Wal, that preacher has done went too far.” So Jacob assembled the menfolk of Stay More and they took a split rail off a fence and carried it to the preacher and Jacob said, “Climb up. Or do you need a saddle?” and, to use the expression that would be employed whenever this ceremony was duplicated in the future, they “rode him out of town on a rail.” He protested, “If it weren’t fer the honor, I’d jist as soon walk.” He was never seen again. Nor, for that matter, were any other preachers, saddlebag or otherwise, seen in Stay More for years thereafter.

Except for one instance, to be scrutinized in moderate detail later, Noah lived the life of a celibate bachelor. But he was not a recluse. Over the years people visited him in his treehouse, not just out of curiosity, and he was especially popular with his nephews and nieces; it was said that each of Jacob Ingledew’s five children had “come of age” when he or she was old enough to climb unassisted up the ladder into Noah’s treehouse. Little Benjamin made the first ascent at the age of four, Isaac bested him by going up at three-and-a-half, Rachel was nearly five before she got up, and neither Lum nor Lucinda could do much better than Benjamin. Noah cultivated a knack for making candy apples (he had his own orchard, established with the help of a passing “furriner” named John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed), and these candy apples were the reward for the ascent to his treehouse of his nephews and nieces. But that was not the reason they climbed up to visit him; they climbed because they liked him.

We do not know exactly why. We know so pitifully little about the true workings of Noah’s mind and heart. The one clue we have, if such it be, was that Noah had a wide-eyed sense of wonder which was perhaps childlike or with which the children empathized. Everything either fascinated him or (like Indians) terrified him. He felt constantly confronted with the unknown. Sometimes he would sit idly in his treehouse, just listening to the beating of his heart or to the slow wafting of air in and out of his nostrils, and these things, circulation, respiration, would captivate him with wonder. He never took anything for granted. The sun might so easily choose not to come up some morning, and Noah would not be surprised, he would be just as fascinated as he was with the fact that the sun came up and went down every day.

Noah understood nothing; he only witnessed it. The intricate growth and tasseling and pollination of a stalk of corn was endlessly absorbing to him, but he did not comprehend the sexuality of plants any better than he did the sexuality of animals. Like any rural person, he was exposed daily to the varied spectacle of one animal affixing itself to another animal for the purpose of perpetuating its species and experiencing pleasure into the bargain. Noah watched these spectacles entranced. We cannot know to what extent he felt excluded from Nature’s grand saturnalia, nor are we going to learn how much or how little appetite he personally possessed, much less how, if ever, he gratified it, but we can discern this much: that Noah, knowing nothing and understanding less, knew at least the fundamental difference between man and the other animals in regard to the ritual of mating: that for all animals it required